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Page 3
=In the meantime, however, all the other nations would dump their silver
upon us and we should be overloaded with it.=
Where would the silver come from? The best authorities agree that there is
not enough free silver in the world to even fill the place of our gold,
which, you say, would be expelled. And right here is where the advocates
of the gold standard contradict every well-established principle of
political economy, and every lesson of experience, by declaring that the
transfer of all our gold to Europe would not cheapen it there, and that
free coinage would not increase the value of silver. They insist that we
should still have "50-cent dollars." Stripped of all its fine garniture of
rhetoric, their proposition simply amounts to this: The sudden addition of
20 per cent. to Europe's supply of gold would not cheapen it, and making a
market here for all the free silver in the world would not raise its
value; laying the burden of sustaining an enormous mass of credit currency
on one metal instead of two has added nothing to the value of that metal;
a thirty years' war on the other metal was not the cause of its
depreciation in terms of gold, and if the conditions were reversed,
greatly increasing the demand for silver and decreasing the demand for
gold, they would remain in relative values just the same. If those
propositions are true, all political economy is false.
=Government cannot create values, in silver or anything else.=
You have seen it done fifty times if you are as old as I. During the war,
government once raised the price of horses $20 per head in a single day.
On a certain day the land in the Platte Valley, for perhaps one hundred
miles west of Omaha, was worth pre�mption price; the next day it was worth
much more, and in a year three or four times as much. Government had
authorized the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, and before a
single spade of earth was turned, millions of dollars in value had been
added to the land. It had created a new use for the land. Value inheres in
use when the thing used can be bought and sold. Whatever creates a use
creates value, and a great increase in use forces an increase in value,
provided that the supply does not increase equally fast; and with silver
that is an impossibility. If you think government cannot add value to a
metal, consider this conundrum: What would be the present value of gold
if all nations should demonetize it? It can be calculated approximately.
There is on hand enough gold to supply the arts for forty years at the
present rate of consumption. What, then, is the present value of a
commodity of which the world has forty years' supply on hand and all
prepared for immediate use?
Take notice, also, that in the decade 1850-60 Germany, Austria, and
Belgium completely demonetized gold, and Holland and Portugal partially
did so, thus depriving it of its legal tender quality among 70,000,000
people, and that this added very greatly to its then depression.
=Free coinage would bring us to a silver basis, and that would take us
out of the list of superior nations, and put us on the grade of the
low-civilization countries.=
That is, I presume, we should become as dirty as the Chinese, and as
unprogressive as the Central Americans, agnostics like the Japanese, and
revolutionary like the Peruvians. And, by a parity of reasoning, the gold
standard will make us as fanatical as the Turks, as superstitious as the
Spaniards, and as hot-tempered and revengeful as the Moors. If not, why
not? They all have the gold standard. You may say that this answer is
foolish, and I don't think much of it myself, but it is strictly according
to Scripture (Proverbs xxv. 5). The retort is on a par with the
proposition, and both are claptrap. The progress of nations and their rank
in civilization depend on causes quite aside from the metal basis of their
money.
We must remember that for many years after the establishment of the Mint
we had in this country little or no coin in circulation except silver, and
were just as much on a silver basis then as Mexico is now. Were our
forefathers, then, inferior to us, or on a par with the Mexicans and
Chinamen of the present day? Even down to 1840 the silver in circulation
greatly exceeded the gold in amount.
By the way, where do you goldites get the figures to justify you in
creating the impression on the public mind that Mexico and the Central and
South American States are overloaded with silver, having a big surplus
which we are in danger of having "dumped" on us? Didn't you know that they
are really suffering from a scarcity of silver? that altogether they have
not a sixth of what we have? One who judged from goldite talk only, would
conclude that silver is a burden in those countries, that they have to
carry it about in hods. Now what are the facts?
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